“I love sweets, — heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream …”–Frank Bidart
Oh Tim, does my manifold misery know no bounds? In what new ways has my dreary fate been shoved down my gullet?
I woke up in a confused and drunken state in my parents’ house. Turbulent times have evicted me from my former place of residence, and I now assume a new role as the family man-child, taking both solace and residence in my childhood bedroom. Picture pastel blue walls, little league trophies, spelling bee awards, a race-car bed. Tim, my life has receded into a dark and sullen place. In fact, just after waking up this morning, I wept for a full minute.
Things were not looking good. And to make matters worse, a tropical rain had begun to pound the roof of my small house. It was a dry summer, for the most part, until this past week. Inconveniently, my mother and father had planned to spend the day at the beach. Oh, fickle fate, with what grievances have my lifegivers burthened you? My brother was also home, as was my mongrel dog. It was a full house — and there was nowhere to go.
“Let’s play scrabble!” shouted dad.
“Twister!” squealed mom.
“Russian Roulette!” I offered — internally, of course.
All of a sudden, a great streak of lightning set the sky into blazes; a baritone of thunder followed, which left the china quivering in its cabinet. The dog barked and mother screamed; I felt a churning in my nether parts.
“What a doozy,” sighed brother, who was casting a languid gaze out the window. Across the street, a splay of lightning had transformed the neighborhood into an amphitheater of glow and woe. Cars had pulled over; trees were swaying like pendulums; my elderly neighbor, garbed in a gaudy yellow slicker, was making her way back to her front door. I couldn’t hear her screams, but her contorted mouth told me that she was enmeshed in the clutches of misery. Before I could make any further assessments, all went black inside my house.
“Christ!” mother shouted, “the ice cream in the freezer — it’s going to melt!”
Mother is a decorated ice cream chef who had just finished whipping up a batch of her famous pecan swirl, which she hoped to enter in the county bakeoff this Tuesday. She quickly did the math: without power, the freezer was a ticking time bomb — the consistency of this woman’s sweet cream would soon hang in the balance. We huddled around the dining room table.
“Let’s think fast,” said dad, “how do we fix this?”
“Call the power company?” I asked.
“Do that.”
I whipped out my cell phone, but alas, no reception. The others’ phones yielded the same result.
“What about the fusebox?” brother piped up.
“Well,” hummed dad, “I don’t know where it is, and honestly, I don’t know what I’d do with it if I found it.”
After minutes of heavy rumination, an idea jolted through my body. I jumped as if I had just received an enema of coffee.
“Wait! What if we somehow attract the lightning so that it sets the power back…like with some sort of metal?”
“Brilliant!” mother applauded. “We must have some aluminum bats downstairs from when you guys played little league.”
“Actually,” frowned Dad, “I sold those to the Salvation Army last summer…”
“Isn’t the Salvation Army a nonprofit?” I asked.
Suddenly, the dog began to bark.
“What’s that?” mother queried the dog. “there’s a hefty amount of aluminum in some of the baking utensils?”
The dog yipped, and we rushed to the kitchen. In the glow coming through the hall, my mother lifted her precious pots, pans, and instruments to her face. But then, she began to sob.
“We can’t use these!” she announced through tears. “I love them more than my own children!”
My brother and I understood. I rubbed his hand, and he, mine. Then that’s when I saw it: the glimmer and glisten from inside the drawer below the sink. Aluminum foil. Tim, it was then that I knew what I had to do — and do I certainly did.
Grabbing the roll, I sprinted to the back window of the living room, which I then propped open.
“Hurry!” shouted mother, “the freezer’s temperature has gone down two degrees already!”
But I was out the window by now. Cold water poured like a waterfall upon my head. The siding of the house was slick and slippery, but I am an adept climber: many a fortuitous high school night had allowed me to sneak in and out of my house with ease. Today, despite the rain, would prove no different. However, once I made it onto the roof, a shiver crept its way through my bones.
From my vantage point, I could see the sparks of lightning filling the valleys of my tiny, dreary town. The streaks looked as though they were sent down from the heavens itself, as if whoever’s curmudgeon of a god up there decided that today would be the day of retribution. But who could blame him? After all, it was we who were using up the world’s resources; we who were starting wars; we who had replaced sociability with Instagram, Snapchat, and Grindr. Good lord, Tim, we had even invented a stick to take pictures of ourselves. I felt anger in my hands, anger in my belly — anger from my grundle to my gut. And, well damnit! it was making me quite hard!
With a cry of half-passion, half-terror, I climbed the parapets of my chimney until I was at the northernmost tip of my house. I thought to raise the foil above my head so as to turn myself into a conductor of energy and light, sacrificing my soul and frame for the sake of mother’s cream. But then, a better, far more tantalizing idea snuck its way into my sordid head.
With cunning and artifice, I managed to balance myself supine atop the chimney. With fervor, ardor, and whatever else was running through my veins, I tore off my pants and began to stroke at my beleaguered penis. Oh, Tim, never had I felt so alive! Up there on my roof, I quickly realized that I was risking the most precious gift of all, human life — my own, in fact — for the derisory joy that mother would gain after winning her title. The preposterousness of the whole situation sent me into a fit of palpable rage, which unconscionably led me to achieve the starkest erection I had ever yet mustered. Oh, but this vile planet and its god would make certain that it ended there, for I watched, in terror and ecstasy, as my bloated member seemed to distend beyond its venereal capacity. My eyes were not lying! When I felt as though I could stroke no further, my member, like a cartoon carrot, kept on growing. It grew and grew until, nestled in the clouds, I could see that it had begun to resemble the shape of a human. It had hefty pectorals, a bearded chin, and the ugliest mouth I had ever yet seen.
“For mother’s cream!” the mouth shouted.
Was I hallucinating?
“Give me my jacket!” he cried. My jacket? What on earth was he talking about? And then I remembered: In my left hand was the tin foil, which I then began to unravel. Meanwhile, Tim, I was losing vast amounts of blood from my head, for my penis, had taken command of all my body’s circulation. With a varicose hand, my newly transformed member snatched the foil away from me and, in seconds, fashioned himself a coat of armor. Throwing it on his fleshy, pink back, my gruesome friend extended his body toward the heavens and shook a mangled fist.
“IS THAT ALL YOU CAN MUSTER?!”
I couldn’t take it anymore, Tim! The harrowing situation, my grotesque, anthropomorphic penis. It was all too much.
“Oh god,” I yelled. “I’M GONNA FUCKING NUT!”
And before I could finish my sentence, a crack was heard and an impossibly harsh shard of lightning illuminated the sky before me. My alloy-coated penis, the sly bastard — he had attracted a bolt! Mother’s cream would be saved! I heard cheers in the house below me, saw cherubs and centaurs half a world away, gleaming at me, calling me by name. Tim, I had achieved Nirvana.
My pleasure, however, was short-lived, for my body, within a dram of seconds, was reduced to the size and substance of burnt toast. Despite this, in my last milliseconds of consciousness, I envisioned my mother standing on the winner’s block at the fair, her pecan swirl ice cream held high above over her head.
I died with a smile on my charred and waning face.
Art by basper01
Originally published at deartimtheblog.tumblr.com.
